The Lynching Memorial

Here are a few paragraphs I wrote today about my visit last June to the lynching memorial in Montgomery AL.  I'm sending it to my professor but it became a writing exercise specifically to eliminate passive verbs (so hard!)


I went on a 5 day civil-rights oriented bus trip this summer sponsored by my synagogue.  We visited the lynching memorial in Montgomery which has the unfortunate name of "The National Memorial for Peace and Justice"  just too vague.  Built on a several square block site of open land in a residential area, the central large open air structure contains big squares of metal first mounted on the ground and eventually high above you.  Each labeled metal piece represents a county from a Southern state.   Etchings on each county square memorialize the names of those lynched in that county and the date.  The designers built the whole site on a very large scale.

I know that the builders wished to commemorate those lost individuals (who died in lynchings) as important people. Maybe, I thought that this all represented a large database with the metal chunks being files (specific places to store data) and the names comprised the data.  As a work in progress researchers would uncover past (or future) lynchings and the metal squares would need to be updated.  Not all of metal squares fit in the main structure; some were mounted outside.  Maybe the creators found so many lynchings in so many different places that even the huge scale of the memorial could not accommodate them all.



I entered the big open area building and the squares of metal with the names are mounted on the ground in rows like a graveyard.  As a visitor to the South, I don't recognize the county names nor the individual names.  I strolled along and the mounting of the metal squares gradually start to rise; to eye level and eventually at the end I see the metal squares way way above me, kind of ethereal like they are raising to heaven.  Or that the lynching victims still hang there, violated and murdered, above my head, as if I myself had attended their lynching.